The time to buy a house if you are lucky enough to have available credit may be right now. I keep cringing when I see how steeply home prices are falling and even more so when I see foreclosures going for a pittance of their current value, much less what they will in a few years. If you have the means I would suggest you start looking at current mortgage rates and your local listings. Do you want to know how low some of these properties are going for? Let me give you a few examples I have seen recently. I looked at renting a house fourteen months ago and said forget it, because as nice as it was it was priced to cover their ballooning mortgage. They wanted $1100.00 a month and that got me a pool and hot tub which I had to cover an additional $100 monthly maintenance fee on. That wasn’t a huge deal, but the houses on either side which were just as big were renting for $800 and $900 a month. The house I would say valued at nearly $175k when I looked at it. It sold two weeks ago for $90k. I could have made the payment on a $90k home over thirty years even with a steep fixed interest rate. Another home I looked at buying nearly five years had five bedrooms, pool, hot tub, and two outbuildings with utilities sat on two acres in town and had a price tag of $300k. It was foreclosed on and sold at a sheriffs sale a month ago for just over $60k. The deals are out there and I wish I was in a better position, because even with higher interest rates the current homes on the market are way under valued. Be it for yourself or as an investment, now looks like a good time to buy if you can.

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Getting credit cards is not going to be an easy thing to do for the foreseeable future unless you are one of those no credit history college students that seem to still being offered credit hand over fist.  That simply isn’t a practice I can fathom or condone really.  It would serve any of the companies pandering to the vanity and lack of experience college freshman often have to have the debts declared null and void.  That however wouldn’t teach any better lesson to these irresponsible kids than bailing out Wall Street teaches irresponsible corporate executives.

That said credit is still available even if the market is shrinking.  Even if you don’t have the best credit, you can still get a credit card, but you will likely pay through the nose for it and that may end up leaving you worse off than your were.  Credit Cards however are a must for many things right now and even those with bad credit will need them if they want to get by.  I am not talking about debit cards for your checking account or prepaid cards either.  I tried to rent a car after I started having problem and found not only would they not take my debit card which was backed by five times what I was trying to spend I had a prepaid credit card with an equal amount of cash.  There wasn’t a car rental company that would take either one.   In fact they wanted nearly a thousand dollar down payment to rent me a $49.00 a day car on top of prepayment for the two days I needed the car and another twenty bucks to pay for their required insurance package.  In the end I took the$1118.00 they want me to pony up for a two day car and bought a cheap car that lasted eight months.  All of this could have been avoided by having a real credit card.

In the end I know who was responsible for my credit even if getting hurt at work wasn’t my fault.  Bad things happen to good people all the time and they have no control over it, but they still have to hold themselves accountable for the choices that were theirs to make.  Get yourself the credit you need but be very careful how you use it.

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For those considering bankruptcy you might want to take a moment and step back from the situation.  If you are jobless, unemployed, downsized, outsourced or only have your crappy barely better than minimum wage job, you can probably go ahead with bankruptcy and be no worse off.  However if you have managed to maintain your credit keep your job, and have no serious prospects of losing your job you might consider a Debt Consolidation Loan.

What a debt consolidation loan does is consolidate all or most of your credit bills into a single loan.  This loan can come in many, many forms.  The reasoning for making sure you will have a steady income to pay a debt consolidation loan off is you are often times putting up equity to secure the loan.  That equity is often times your home.  This isn’t something to undertake lightly.  Lose your job with an equity loan against your house and you could find yourself not only jobless, but homeless as well.

As with any financial product you should seek the advice of a professional and ask them all the questions you might have after having done the preliminary research.  My advice is is just that, advice and should be taken for what it is worth.

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Much can be said for the state of New Jersey, and depending on who you ask it might be good or it might not be so good.  Whenever I hear anyone say New Jersey is the greatest place in the world I immediately ask myself why does the Statue of Liberty face the other way ?  All jokes aside I actually think of Bruce Springsteen when I hear New Jersey.  My wife, Katy, on the other hand simply glared at me when she saw I put that down, so I must add when she hears New Jersey it is all about Bon Jovi.

Real Estate New Jersey is not something that usually comes to mind when you think about The Garden State, unless you are convince Jimmy Hoffa is buried on some piece of New Jersey real estate.  However New Jersey Real Estate is still one of the hottest markets for real estate in the country, despite hard economic times.  The last couple of years alone has seen a nearly four percent growth in its population.

That said New Jersey was already the most densely populated states in the country and the second most wealthy per capita.  It owes both of those factors do to its proximity to New York City and Philadelphia.  With both large cities of its own and commuter towns servicing even larger cities, there is going to remain a growing real estate market in the state for some time to come.  If you are looking to move the Garden State you are most certainly going to need help from a good local realtor to get the best deal possible.

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In this time of uncertainty during the holidays getting another credit card might be the furthest thing from your mind. Then again you maybe looking at the job that is about to be no more and know when it does your credit score will be trashed regardless of what you do, so why not make Christmas as good as you can. I have been there.

If you decide to go forward with getting a credit card, you need to be smart about where you decide to apply for it. Credit Card Applications are easy to fill out online and even easier to do it en masse now, but if you aren’t careful about where or who you are filling them out with you could be in serious trouble that goes well beyond the damage done to defaulted credit cards.

I am talking about identity theft.  As someone who has been through the wringer on this and had people commit crimes while using my identity I can tell you that this is no picnic.  I am still trying to recover from it more than a dozen years after it happened and will probably be paying for it for the rest of my life.  So research where you give your information out before you do it, or you could have more problems than bankruptcy on your hands.

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If you are looking for a fast paced exciting time in the world of investing Forex Currency Trading.  Forex or Foreign Exchange Currency trading is where currency trading takes place. Forex transactions typically involve you buying a set quantity of one currency and then pay for it with another.

This is a pretty good opportunity when it works, but when things go wrong as they always do when you play the markets they can go seriously wrong.  The way things work in the forex market is pretty simple to explain and it will look easy to make money.  You start out with say ten thousand dollars US and buy another currency say and hope it moves higher against the dollar.  The more you invest the less it has to move to make a profit.

The down side of that is the more you invest the more you stand to lose.  You will have a hard time making anything on a hundred, thousand or even ten thousand dollars once you pay from trading commissions unless their is a major shift in the market.  So you often look to your trading house to let you leverage against your investment.  This isn’t so bad until you are down and they call you on it.

In the end when you win, you can certainly win big, but when you lose you can lose it all.  Don’t go into forex currency trading or any other investments without making a serious study of programs available and be willing to risk losing everything.

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As much as it is possible to create economic opportunities by playing video games and selling the characters, it is also possible and more inline with old economic models to sell actual physical game disks and cartridges for profit.  Unlike selling used software, this appears to have none of the same copyright concerns for either the seller nor company.  This is mostly because you can’t play the game without the disk or cartridge, unlike PC based games.

I know you are questioning whether or not this is profitable, so lets take a look at the methodology and what it would take to win with this model.  First, you need to know something about the games and and gaming in general.  This is easily acquired knowledge, but something you can’t skimp on our you could end up on the wrong side of your customers after getting scammed by your suppliers.  Secondly, you need at least one retail outlet, like Amazon or eBay.  You can sell directly from your own web site as well for great profits and control, but you will have less exposure and need to maintain the site.  The last thing you need will be a supplier, which can be as simple as your own kids, or as complex as reselling from game lots purchased on eBay.  The easiest and most secure I have found is simply running a newspaper ad and putting up fliers where kids congregate in your community.

If you are asking whether or not this is profitable then I can tell you from my own experience, yes it is.  Take the Nintendo DS or the Nintendo Wii for example.  The most popular new games can resell for as much as eighty percent of the original price, but after a few weeks of release finding a supplier at fifty to seventy percent won’t be hard.  After a few months the resell value drops to sixty to seventy percent and the wholesale to fifty percent or less.  After six months the resell price can go as low as forty percent the original retail price, but the wholesale value can drop to as little as twenty percent.  You can keep tabs on popular games like Mario Kart DS on various online price comparison sites.

There are ups and downs in this business like any others, and like every other business it shouldn’t be entered into lightly.  Do your research and prepare yourself to spend a lot of your time reading about and playing video games.

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If you are facing hard times right now and might be out of your house or other property you need to make some serious choices about what you are going to do with it before it becomes somebody else’s problem. Even if the bank is taking your home or your second vacation property is up for sale you need to think about vacant property insurance.  If something happens on your property before it is out of your hands you need to remember that there are things you might not be able to write off like a judgment against you.

It just isn’t safe to be without insurance on your vacant property.  Not only is it not safe, it might be in further violation of your contracts with lenders.  I am not really sure how it you might end up if your vacant home burns to the ground and you are trying to declare bankruptcy. What I do know is you might be in for big problems not only from your lender but from the bankruptcy court.

As always insurance or financial responsibility is required of us on just about anything we own be it a dog or a home.  Furthermore it is our responsibility not only to make sure we are properly covered as per our lender agreements, but responsible to ourselves in these tight economic times we are not paying for more than we need or over paying for what we are getting.

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In the ruin of our economy there are but few options left to most of us. As someone intimately familiar with bankruptcy I can tell you that it is no picnic. I wonder if it was the smartest move for us many a day. I wonder if maybe I should have thought more about debt consolidation with some sort of reasonable firm.

Regardless of what you choose it never feels right to those of us who are honest enough about our financial situation.  We grew up believing that debts needed to be paid and when they weren’t well that was a sort of failure.  Failure or not, we know bad things sometimes happen to good people and can accept it for others and ourselves even if it still doesn’t feel right to us on some level.

Debt consolidation, rather than bankruptcy  or the dreaded credit counseling services which destroy your financial life just as bad as bankruptcy and still make you pay everything back, is certainly an option.  If we had more equity in the house and Katy hadn’t gotten hurt I think this would most definitely been an option for us.  Is it an option for you?  You will never know until you look at all the facts.

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In part two of our New Economy Stores series I look want to take a look at one of the more inventive ways you can make money.  If you have been online more than a year you have probably heard of games like World of Warcraft.  These types of multi-player online games exist only in the virtual world but have real world economics attached to them.  Just like our desire driven physical world where patience is rarely seen as much of a personal virtue many online gamers, want to start out with as much as they can.  If you have the money you can buy world of warcraft account with characters already made awesome by someone else’s labors.

I know many of you who don’t play games will see this as sort of cheating, and to be honest it is.  I much prefer to start from scratch and do it myself.  On the other hand I have the time and the patience to learn a game system and the type of personality that wants to figure these things out.  That said of me I am also the type who supplies these online retailers with new characters and virtual gear.

Is this going to be a money maker for your average joe?  Probably not, but if you have the time and the patience to learn the rules of the game you can set yourself you can learn a game like World of Warcraft or a social environment like Second Life and begin to make money.

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